How To Feed A Family Of 4 For Under £7 A Day

There are so many blogs and guides out there showing you how to feed your family on under a fiver a day – I don’t know how they do it! To me £7 a day is a much more realistic and reasonable amount that you can keep up all year round. What’s more, it’s still way under the average family spend of £58 a week on food.

Here’s how you can do it in four easy ways, with a sample menu at the end for inspiration, 🙂

Meal planning

The key to sticking to a food budget is making a meal plan each week. Whatever you do, don’t go to the supermarket without a list as this leads to far more waste – you’ll end up buying food that doesn’t go together. With meal planning, you can also buy more expensive foods like meat in bulk (meat and fish make up a quarter of the average £58 a week) and use it for two or more meals each week, or put some in the freezer for another time. This plan shows you how.

Head to the freezer aisle

Speaking of the freezer, there’s absolutely no reason to associate frozen food products with tasteless or low nutrition meals. In fact, frozen fruit and vegetables keep the nutrients locked in. Plus, you can buy large packs of things like mince, chops and fish fillets and keep it for longer. Frozen potato products like crispy French fries and roast potatoes are one area where it can still be economical to buy ready prepared, and McCain Frozen products are better than my homemade versions any day.

Make your own

There are certain products that we buy for convenience week in week out without thinking about the cost per item. Snacks bars are a prime example, with some costing 75p and upwards each, even in a multipack. Instead, ingredients like oats, seeds and a small amount of dried fruit go a long way. This granola bar recipe makes 18 bars, so it is far better value than a shop bought pack of four or five bars. Just add any dried fruit or nuts you have in the cupboard.

Swap out some brands

We get used to our favourite brands and often think that branded products taste so much better than the supermarket alternatives. However, the programme Eat Well For Less just shows that we can’t always tell the difference. They run blind taste tests and people are often amazed when they prefer the own brand products. Have your own trials and sample a couple of different own brand products each week to see which ones you can save on long-term. I bet your kids won’t tell the difference!

Sample menu

Breakfast: Own brand cereal or overnight oats with banana and honey
Snacks: Homemade snack bars or popcorn
Lunch: Homemade pizza using 50p pizza base mix, tomato puree based sauce and your choice of toppings
Dinner: Cook from frozen lamb chops, roast potatoes and peas.

What do you think of these ideas? Do you do meal planning too? Do you also buy frozen food? What else can you add to these ideas? 

*Disclosure: Collaborative Post

Thanks for stopping by,

Love you all ❤️

Franca  💋

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